Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
CENTURIES OF SEMANTICS
Iwas a caged animal, pacing against technicalities as I watched the ripple effect of Jarovid’s death.
The dramatic uproar wherever I went was obnoxious.
I’d always been respected in the streets of Hell, but there was a new reaction whenever I left the palace for the cobbled streets. Whether fear or disapproval, the whispers of demons on the streets confirmed a certainty: no one doubted why the royal lineage was passing to me.
I’d carried the power of a god-killer for a millennia. Before our battle in the mountains, the strength that came with my crown simmered within me, untested.
Hell greeted me with renewed reverence.
Topside, I had to learn to internalize my irritation.
It would serve neither me, nor my Love, if I met every deity for the rest of her cycles with hostility.
But the change in their behavior…Did treaties mean nothing?
I was annoyed by their shock, given the lengths to which I’d gone to follow our agreements, which both hardened and emboldened me.
As an unforeseen consequence of new reputations: I was met with caution, inhospitality, or outright hostility in new territories.
When a god truly smites a fellow immortal, there is no three-day stone that rolls away from the tomb.
They aren’t reborn as a phoenix. They wouldn’t return as a tree.
No one awaited their invasion of another body, their burst from the bottom of a lake, their appearance in a dream, or any of the etched texts of slain deities who returned with powerful theatrics.
The luxury of poetic reemergence that granted the epic ebb and flow of gods and goddesses came to an end.
My act of grace—a god-killing entity killing without a god-killing weapon—seemed to have been lost as word spread. I might as well have finished him once and for all.
As it stood, my presence couldn’t be risked.
I tolerated regional animosity during Love’s Christian cycles, particularly in the years following the world and its theological tilt in the centuries following Jarovid’s death.
Whether or not I was allowed to be with her, our agreements remained:
Don’t harm my human.
Don’t even touch her.
But just as I found loopholes, so did the gods.
Our treaty said nothing of nudges, of prompts, of whispers.
I was helpless against their pushes, their encouragement, their malignant guidance as they lured her toward a title that would facilitate the prophecy in one lifetime after another.
They beckoned her out of churches, goaded her out of her home, bribed her to step into brothels, to sit down next to Madams, to sidle up to a desperate man with a pocket full of gold, all without touching her.
I followed Love’s soul as humanity—too disorganized to be a colony of ants, too wicked to be a swarm of wasps, too complex and beautiful and nuanced to be the animals I was already bored of comparing them to, and too fleeting to worry about the lasting impact of their sins—filled every corner.
The mortal world was mapped, known, conquered.
Heaven had, as I’d said from the conclave, done exactly what I’d said it would do.
I, on the other hand, did not rise to the occasion.
I was not my father. I had not once served Heaven’s King, loved its ruler, or shared the blood of the covenant with angelic comrades.
I had no bias as I watched a war deity be the very best of his kind.
I had a raw appreciation for the black and white fulfillment of his purpose, but my heart turned cold against thoughts of the war, its strategies, its stakes.
My father fought with me once, and only once, on the topic.
Exasperated, he’d pleaded, “You are my son! You are Hell’s Prince! This is your birthright! You must—”
“Have to disregard all Hell stands for, forgo my free will, fight blindly for a king whether or not I consent?”
He forewent swords and blood and kingdoms and borders while the other pantheons remained stuck in the past. An innovator, he began conquering culture, consciousness, minds, dreams, and every deviation of war long before the others knew they could expand their definitions.
He won.
Yet even his own book had an antagonist and thus continued my usefulness on the global stage.
No one had seen him in four thousand years. But if I got the chance…
I popped my knuckles at the thought.
Cryptids, fae, lesser entities, inter-realm parasites, discarded heralds, spirits, beings of battle, creatures of the garden, wights, omens, lurkers, dream-feeders, relics, saints, nameless miracle-workers, witches, warlocks, wraiths, beasts of elder names, unseen governors, the half-divine, stray seraphim, lesser angels, the vast majority of Hell’s citizens, royal or otherwise, and the a rambling litany of preternatural beings too long to bother spewing, none of which could land a killing blow, even if they had the gumption.
They’d already believed in the champion we might conceive before witnessing how I’d ended a sovereign member of the undying. Now, global eyes turned toward me, convinced their role was more important than ever, even at the risk of their immortality.
One piece of the prophecy remained. My caution, in theory, would have been unwarranted in her lives as a mother, a seamstress, a shaman, a basket weaver, a military wife, if she’d ever wanted to have children.
We could have sired a cambion—powerful, magical, and utterly irrelevant to Heaven and its games.
Those days were long gone.
All eyes focused on the missing technicality: Love had to be a whore.
In the hundreds of years that followed, many lost their lives.
Humans to be sure.
Fae in the dozens.
A bold god or two.
But most were subtle with their coercion. Those who came with silk, coin, and a purr, were usually allowed to keep their lives, as long as she remained safe, comfortable, and happy.
Love found herself with Madams, sometimes in the plush of red-velvet brothels, then serving amidst the smoke of opium dens, after that, a Bavarian village making house calls until I ensured she was hired by a foreign dignitary as a live-in mistress on one’s dime.
American boots marched into Port-au-Prince in 1915, which took the pressure off local deities. Gods needn’t get their hands dirty when invading soldiers were so efficient at violating land and body alike.
My wrath earned its own ghost story as the streets ran red with vigilante justice for more than a decade. I was single-handedly responsible for more dead Americans in that cycle than the Haitian resistance.
Death, sex, money.
In some lives she knew me. In many she didn’t.
I was as bound by the treaty as they were.
I couldn’t retaliate if she was unharmed.
Once the die had been cast, it was too late.
The best I could do after she’d been led down the path was facilitate the highest-ranking position, the best pay, the most comfort, and of course, facilitate the sudden heart attack, choking on tongue, stroke, aneurism, and any other instant death to a man who made her feel disempowered, even for a moment, while she worked.
I waited roughly fifteen hundred years before Jarovid paid for what he’d done when he’d overseen the men who’d tortured her, brutalized her, then tied her hands and feet as she was pulled in four directions.
The years I’d refused to participate in the lore were long behind us. The days of gods egging me out of Hell had come and gone. The conclave, at long last, granted me the retaliation I craved.
Vengeance lingered as I hunted the missing traitor.
In 1947, a twenty-one-year-old named Winifred bore a thick Irish accent, a round, happy face, and the daily chore of salting and dying cod in the cold, North Atlantic island of Newfoundland.
I caught wind that the rocky settlement was disproportionately plagued with a night demon they called “the old hag.”
Sailors, mothers, babes, would awaken to a twisted woman sitting on their chest, paralyzing them as it terrorized the island.
In thousands of years, I’d learned the stack of tricks played by the succubus.
And it was here, in this cycle, I knew I’d find my sister.